The Gateway to the Pacific

The Gateway to the Pacific PDF Author: Meredith Oda
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659274X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

The Gateway to the Pacific

The Gateway to the Pacific PDF Author: Meredith Oda
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659274X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

The Pacific Way

The Pacific Way PDF Author: Ratu Kamisese Mara
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824818937
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Ratu Sir Kamisese's thoughtful and entertaining memoir of his personal and political life candidly outlines significant events in the development of Fiji, a plural society for which The Pacific Way holds a special and evocative meaning. The phrase inspired his 1970 partnership with the Indian opposition leader to produce a constitution whereby, in his own words, "people of different races, opinions and cultures can live and work together for the good of all, can differ without rancour, govern without malice, and accept responsibility as reasonable people intent on serving the interests of all." After leading Fiji through 17 years of multiracial harmony, he found it ironic that his defeat in 1987, opposed by an Indian-dominated coalition and a fervid Fijian Nationalist Party, was provoked by his multiracialism. But this same multiracial vision enabled him, after the military coups in 1987, to lead an interim government that restored stability and economic progress. As the appointed President of Fiji, he is sustained by wide popular acclaim and affection. Very few Pacific leaders have published their opinions and perspectives on such a wide range of issues and topics. In addition to his long and distinguished political life, he tells of his chiefly heritage, his early education and medical studies at Otago University, his years at Oxford University, and his career as a colonial administrator. His memoir will be of outstanding interest to Pacific historians, political scientists, and anthropologists, as well as the general reader.

Imperial Gateway

Imperial Gateway PDF Author: Seiji Shirane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501765582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In Imperial Gateway, Seiji Shirane explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Challenging understandings of empire that focus on bilateral relations between metropole and colonial periphery, Shirane uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan's imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order. Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

The Pacific

The Pacific PDF Author: Donald B. Freeman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136604154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this fascinating and exciting overview, Donald B. Freeman explores the role of the Pacific Ocean in human history. Covering over one third of the globe, the Pacific Ocean plays a vital role in the lives and fortunes of more than two billion people who live on its rim-lands and islands. It has played a crucial part in shaping the histories of the different Pacific cultures, towards which it has appeared in a variety of different guises. Exploring the ocean’s place in human history, this wide ranging book draws together the long and varied physical, economic, cultural and political history of the Pacific, from Prehistory through to the present day. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to show the changing viewpoints of those who explored, exploited and settled the Pacific, including the inhabitants of its Asian and American rim-lands. The book draws on new research in a variety of areas, such as early Pacific migrations, impacts of European colonization, the effects of climate change, and current economic and political developments. It provides a uniquely broad overview that will be of vital interest to students and to all those with an interest in World History.

Glamour in the Pacific

Glamour in the Pacific PDF Author: Fiona Paisley
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824833422
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories. Glamour in the Pacific tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. Early chapters consider the first PPWA conferences and the decolonizing process undergone by the association. Following World War II, a new generation of nonwhite women from decolonized and settler colonial nations began to claim leadership roles in the Association, challenging the often Eurocentric assumptions of women’s internationalism. In 1955 the first African American delegate brought to the fore questions about the relationship of U.S. race relations with the Pan-Pacific cultural internationalist project. The effects of cold war geopolitics on the ideal of international cooperation in the era of decolonization were also considered. The work concludes with a discussion of the revival of "East meets West" as a basis for world cooperation endorsed by the United Nations in 1958 and the overall contributions of the PPWA to world culture politics. The internationalist vision of the early twentieth century imagined a world in which race and empire had been relegated to the past. Significant numbers of women from around the Pacific brought this shared vision—together with their concerns for peace, social progress and cooperation—to the lively, even glamorous, political experiment of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association. Fiona Paisley tells the stories of this extraordinary group of women and illuminates the challenges and rewards of their politics of antiracism—one that still resonates today.

Voyages and Beaches

Voyages and Beaches PDF Author: Alex Calder
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824820398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
What actually happened as Europeans and peoples of the Pacific discovered each other? How have their respective senses of the past influenced their understanding of the present? And what are the consequences of their meeting? In this collection of essays, scholars from European, Polynesian, and Settler backgrounds provide answers to these questions. Writing from, and between, a variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, Maori Studies, literary criticism, law, cultural studies, art history, Pacific Studies), they show how the Pacific reveals a more various and contradictory history than that supposed by such homogenizing metropolitan myths as the introduction of civilization to savage peoples, the general ruin of indigenous cultures by an imperial juggernaut, or the mimicry of European models by an abject population. They examine contact from both sides of beaches throughout Polynesia, exposing the many inconsistencies from which Pacific history is made. Some of the essays consider the extent to which traditional European ideas about organizing and legitimizing claims to territory and power were invoked and problematized in the South Pacific; some consider the violence endemic in such scenes; others examine the aesthetic discourses with which early travelers and settlers attempted to make sense of the Pacific in the aftermath of "discovery." But rather than reiterate the myths and anti-myths of conquest, these essays show how local differences have made and do make a difference. They emphasize the Pacific's capacity to absorb and transform the impact of Europe, an impact that has been as notable for its ambivalence and confusion as for its single-minded pursuit of hegemony. The editors develop these themes in a wide-ranging introduction that relates Pacific concerns to a more global set of theoretical and methodological problems, including current work in post-colonial and subaltern studies.

Pacific Futures

Pacific Futures PDF Author: Warwick Anderson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824884302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
How, when, and why has the Pacific been a locus for imagining different futures by those living there as well as passing through? What does that tell us about the distinctiveness or otherwise of this “sea of islands”? Foregrounding the work of leading and emerging scholars of Oceania, Pacific Futures brings together a diverse set of approaches to, and examples of, how futures are being conceived in the region and have been imagined in the past. Individual chapters engage the various and sometimes contested futures yearned for, unrealized, and even lost or forgotten, that are particular to the Pacific as a region, ocean, island network, destination, and home. Contributors recuperate the futures hoped for and dreamed up by a vast array of islanders and outlanders—from Indigenous federalists to Lutheran improvers to Cantonese small business owners—making these histories of the future visible. In so doing, the collection intervenes in debates about globalization in the Pacific—and how the region is acted on by outside forces—and postcolonial debates that emphasize the agency and resistance of Pacific peoples in the context of centuries of colonial endeavor. With a view to the effects of the “slow violence” of climate change, the volume also challenges scholars to think about the conditions of possibility for future-thinking at all in the midst of a global crisis that promises cataclysmic effects for the region. Pacific Futures highlights futures conceived in the context of a modernity coproduced by diverse Pacific peoples, taking resistance to categorization as a starting point rather than a conclusion. With its hospitable approach to thinking about history making and future thinking, one that is open to a wide range of methodological, epistemological, and political interests and commitments, the volume will encourage the writing of new histories of the Pacific and new ways of talking about history in this field, the region, and beyond.

Huihui

Huihui PDF Author: Jeffrey Carroll
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824847725
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This groundbreaking anthology is the first to navigate the interconnections between the rhetorics and aesthetics of the Pacific. Like the bright and multifaceted constellation for which it is named, Huihui: Rhetorics and Aesthetics in the Pacific showcases a variety of genres and cross-genre forms—critical essays, poetry, short fiction, speeches, photography, and personal reflections—that explore a wide range of subjects, from Disney’s Aulani Resort to the Bishop Museum, from tiki souvenirs to the Dusky Maiden stereotype, from military recruitment to colonial silencing, from healing lands to healing words and music, from decolonization to sovereignty. These works go beyond conceiving of Pacific rhetorics and aesthetics as being always and only in response to a colonizing West and/or East. Instead, the authors emphasize the importance of situating their work within indigenous intellectual, political, and cultural traditions and innovations of the Pacific. Taken together, this anthology threads ancestral and contemporary discursive strategies, questions colonial and oppressive representations, and seeks to articulate an empowering decolonized future for all of Oceania. Representing several island and continental nations, the contributing authors include Albert Wendt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Mililani Trask, Chantal Spitz, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Flora Devatine, Kalena Silva, Steven Winduo, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Selina Tusitala Marsh, ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Craig Santos Perez, Gregory Clark, Chelle Pahinui, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Michael Puleloa, Lisa King, and Steven Gin. Collectively, their words guide us over ocean routes like the great wa‘a, va‘a, waka, proa, and sakman once navigated by the ancestors of Oceania, now navigated again by their descendants.

Island Infernos

Island Infernos PDF Author: John C. McManus
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 069819277X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
In Fire and Fortitude—winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History—John C. McManus presented a riveting account of the US Army's fledgling fight in the Pacific following Pearl Harbor. Now, in Island Infernos, he explores the Army’s dogged pursuit of Japanese forces, island by island, throughout 1944, a year that would bring America ever closer to victory or defeat. “A feat of prodigious scholarship.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Wonderful.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch • “Outstanding.”—Publishers Weekly • “Rich and absorbing.”—Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins • “A considerable achievement, and one that, importantly, adds much to our understanding of the Pacific War.”—James Holland, author of Normandy ’44 After some two years at war, the Army in the Pacific held ground across nearly a third of the globe, from Alaska’s Aleutians to Burma and New Guinea. The challenges ahead were enormous: supplying a vast number of troops over thousands of miles of ocean; surviving in jungles ripe with dysentery, malaria, and other tropical diseases; fighting an enemy prone to ever-more desperate and dangerous assaults. Yet the Army had proven they could fight. Now, they had to prove they could win a war. Brilliantly researched and written, Island Infernos moves seamlessly from the highest generals to the lowest foot soldiers and in between, capturing the true essence of this horrible conflict. A sprawling yet page-turning narrative, the story spans the battles for Saipan and Guam, the appalling carnage of Peleliu, General MacArthur’s dramatic return to the Philippines, and the grinding jungle combat to capture the island of Leyte. This masterful history is the second volume of John C. McManus’s trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, proving McManus to be one of our finest historians of World War II.

Gateway State

Gateway State PDF Author: Sarah Miller-Davenport
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691217351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
How Hawai'i became an emblem of multiculturalism during its journey to statehood in the mid-twentieth century Gateway State explores the development of Hawai'i as a model for liberal multiculturalism and a tool of American global power in the era of decolonization. The establishment of Hawai'i statehood in 1959 was a watershed moment, not only in the ways Americans defined their nation’s role on the international stage but also in the ways they understood the problems of social difference at home. Hawai'i’s remarkable transition from territory to state heralded the emergence of postwar multiculturalism, which was a response both to independence movements abroad and to the limits of civil rights in the United States. Once a racially problematic overseas colony, by the 1960s, Hawai'i had come to symbolize John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. This was a more inclusive idea of who counted as American at home and what areas of the world were considered to be within the U.S. sphere of influence. Statehood advocates argued that Hawai'i and its majority Asian population could serve as a bridge to Cold War Asia—and as a global showcase of American democracy and racial harmony. In the aftermath of statehood, business leaders and policymakers worked to institutionalize and sell this ideal by capitalizing on Hawai'i’s diversity. Asian Americans in Hawai'i never lost a perceived connection to Asia. Instead, their ethnic difference became a marketable resource to help other Americans navigate a decolonizing world. As excitement over statehood dimmed, the utopian vision of Hawai'i fell apart, revealing how racial inequality and U.S. imperialism continued to shape the fiftieth state—and igniting a backlash against the islands’ white-dominated institutions.